Who woulda thunk it?

 

Some perspective

Our Heroes!
Taken in August of 2020
Staffs of St. Thomas and Archbishop Lyke

We have had a signed agreement with the Diocese of Cleveland for just 13 months.  The agreement went into effect just 9 months ago!!  Our Assistant Superintendent, Dr. Christian Dallavis, has presented an excellent review of what has gone on in that short period of time.  I have included it in this blog post.  The story of our journey to this point is quite remarkable.  All of this being done during a worldwide pandemic!

September 8, 2020

We have been in school since September 8, 2020.  Our network provided tremendous guidance and materials to provide a safe learning space.  We have experienced no in-school spread of COVID and more and more of our families are coming back for in-person instruction.

Partnership Cleveland

 As we pass the midpoint of Partnership Schools’ first year in Cleveland, we have much to celebrate and a clear sense of our priorities moving forward. In this report, we describe our progress to date in the areas of Catholic school culture, enrollment, academics, facilities, and operations, and we share the status of our efforts to grow our impact in Cleveland.

 Catholic school culture: “We can do hard things!”

 We began our year in Cleveland by focusing on building strong, positive, intentional Catholic school culture. We believe that school culture is the ocean everything swims in at a school and is integral to both academic achievement and student formation. School culture is driven by the root beliefs that motivate and guide school leaders and teachers, so on our first day in Cleveland we helped teachers and leaders articulate a clear and compelling set of beliefs that will drive actions, habits, and mindsets. We have since begun working to align each of the actions of the school day - lessons, rituals, routines, communications, policies, programs, and procedures – so they are explicitly and intentionally aligned to those root beliefs. These actions are becoming the habits that will ensure St. Thomas Aquinas and Archbishop Lyke graduates flourish in high school, college, and beyond.

The transformation of the school cultures at Archbishop Lyke and St. Thomas Aquinas is well underway and already evident in the day to day lives of students, teachers, and the school leaders. We have seen students internalizing the language of these beliefs in unsolicited responses and in classroom instruction; the hallways are adorned with bulletin boards and banners proclaiming “We are better together” and “We are made for each other.” We’ve observed a first grader promising his principal that he would go back to class and try something again because, as he put it, "I know I can do hard things." We’ve heard morning announcements at St. Thomas Aquinas, where the principal starts every day proclaiming, “We are St. Thomas Aquinas…,” and the entire school shouts back with a deafening “AND WE ARE BETTER TOGETHER!”

  

We received a text, sent by a 5^th grader teacher to the entire school team, that said, “Just want everyone to know the 5^th grade has actually started saying ‘yeah, but we can do hard things’ when they have challenges in class. My heart BURSTS.”  And we overheard this exchange between the principal of Archbishop Lyke and a second grader who was sent to her office:

Mrs. Lynch: “What do I always say at announcements?” 

2^nd Grader: “That we’re made for greatness.” 

Mrs. Lynch: “That’s right. So what do you think you should do?”

2^nd Grader: “Apologize?”

Mrs. Lynch: “Well, sure, do you think that will show how great you are? I agree—that will be a good start. And then do you think you can go back to class and spend the rest of the day showing how much greatness you have?”

2^nd Grader: “Yes.”

Mrs. Lynch: “Okay. Let’s wipe those tears, go back to class, and make the rest of the day as great as you are made to be. You know you can do this hard thing.”

 These beliefs—that we are made for greatness, that we are better together, that we can do hard things—are becoming touchstones in conversations, relationships, and decisions in the schools. They offer deeply rooted and shared points of common conviction that motivate the community. Decisions about enrollment growth, curriculum, professional development, improvement planning, health and safety protocols, and hiring have all been framed through the lens of these beliefs, ensuring the decisions and actions of the schools are consistent with its convictions. In the classrooms and hallways, students and teachers are not just internalizing but are themselves actively transmitting a set of beliefs that proclaims each person’s dignity as a child of God, embraces others as community, and affirms their capacity for the extraordinary.

 Enrollment

The results of the shift in mindset are encouraging. Cleveland parents have responded in dramatic numbers to the changes we implemented at Archbishop Lyke and St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Schools, with referrals from current parents the primary driver of new enrollments. Between May and October, the student body grew by nearly 30 percent at Archbishop Lyke and nearly 50 percent at St. Thomas Aquinas. While some of the enrollment growth can be attributed to parent desires for in-person instruction and dissatisfaction with the local public district’s offerings during the pandemic, when we compare the growth of the Partnership Schools (39 percent across both schools) to the rest of the Catholic schools on the east side of Cleveland, to urban Cleveland Catholic schools, and the rest of the diocese, we see the fruits of the work of our principals and enrollment team.

As a result of these enrollment gains, some of our classrooms have reached capacity. We have added sections of kindergarten and third grade at one of our schools, and first grade is on the cusp of splitting into two sections as well. Since the beginning of the year, we have hired four full-time teachers and a teacher’s aide, along with a Partnership Fellow, to support learning for all of these new students. Three of the four full-time teachers we have hired are Black, increasing the diversity of our teacher corps, an important priority in schools where 99 percent of the students are Black but only 23% of the teachers were when the year began. Today 32 percent of all teachers and aides are Black.

School leaders sometimes worry that large enrollment gains may lead to a breakdown in school culture, or disappointment among parents who love small class sizes. In Cleveland, however, school culture is more robust and parent reports are positive, as this grandmother’s text to a first grader teacher illustrates.

 

Re-enrollment efforts launched during Catholic Schools Week, the first week of February, and within one week of opening more than 60 percent of students had already re-enrolled for 2021-2022. We implemented SchoolAdmin, the enrollment management system piloted in New York in 2020, and parents have expressed appreciation for the convenience of this on-line system. The online registration program modernizes the schools’ enrollment processes and streamlines gathering the required documents for the three parental choice scholarships our students receive from the state of Ohio.

 Academics

The joy of learning is palpable when observing classrooms in Cleveland, and the rigor of the new curriculum has been embraced with zeal—as this recent text from a proud principal to us demonstrates. 

As several of our classrooms approach capacity, our focus during the academic year has been to strengthen the rigor of curriculum and quality of instruction. We adopted the same ELA, math, science, and history curriculum across all Cleveland classrooms. And, in order to help Cleveland teachers and principals implement those curricula effectively, the Partnership Academic team has offered top quality, curriculum-driven professional development at both the beginning of the year and at least monthly thereafter. At the beginning of the year, we strove to ensure that every Cleveland classroom launched the year with the curriculum we know helps drive student learning, and in monthly formation gatherings, we work to deepen teachers’ knowledge of and capacity to implement the curriculum, while sharpening their instructional skills. To date, our network team (with our Teach Like a Champion, CKLA, Eureka, and Amplify Science partners) have provided nearly 60 hours of professional development workshops and dozens of hours of coaching to Partnership Cleveland teachers.

The academic achievement baseline in the Cleveland schools, as measured by MAP testing data, is similar to where our New York schools began in 2013. Across both schools and all grades, the average percentile score for reading is 31.1, and 24.9 for math. 

 

The Cleveland schools have taken MAP tests in the past, and a comparison of January 2021 test data to the previous year shows a 15 percent drop in reading and an 11 percent increase in average math percentiles. While this comparison provides a helpful baseline, it is of limited value because only about half of the students tested in Winter 2021 were among the students who were tested the previous year. This dynamic reflects the reality of our substantial enrollment gains—more than 200 students either transferred to a Partnership School or started kindergarten in Fall 2020, and 44 percent of all students tested in 2021 are new to our schools. We are in the process of conducting further analysis to compare results of matched cohorts of students from Year Zero to Year One. 

 Of course, as we know from New York, launching with a new curriculum and a new instructional vision is just the first step in a long road to moving the academic needle. But we are already pleased to see the quality of teaching and learning across all Cleveland partnership schools, and we are excited to see teachers working hard to implement the curriculum successfully and improve instruction.

 Development

Last spring, in the midst of the pandemic-shutdown driven downtown in the economy, we were required to raise over $3 million between February, when the agreement was signed by the bishop, and June 1, 2020. Ultimately, our development team met the challenge and secured $3.2 million in gifts and pledges, enabling our services agreement to go into effect on July 1. Our goal to support Cleveland operations in year two is $2.2MM. We have recently secured new national and local gifts to support the hire of additional teachers and to support operations, with combined payments and pledges totaling $148,000 in new cash with an additional $525,000 of gift indications,  as of mid-February. We have also collected 51 percent ($1.53 million) of the pledge payments from our initial $3 million launch campaign. 

Looking Ahead

Our goal in Cleveland is to develop a network of urban Catholic schools that prove what is possible with the Partnership Schools academic, school culture, and operations model and state-funded parental choice scholarships. Moreover, operating schools in Cleveland strengthens the sustainability of our entire network, as each school added to the Cleveland region offsets the network’s total costs by approximately $400,000.

 We have been in discussions with the diocese since our agreement was signed about potential “phase two” schools to join our network, and the superintendent of the diocese sees a robust Partnership Cleveland network as integral to the diocesan strategic plan that is currently in development. Since December, we have been meeting weekly with the diocesan superintendent to identify and assess prospective schools. We have met with the diocesan legal team (both general counsel and their canon lawyer) to discuss adding more diocesan schools to our current agreement and developing a similar agreement for parish schools, and the diocese is currently drafting agreements for both scenarios. In the meantime, we are meeting with school leaders and pastors of prospective schools to discuss expansion, and our hope is to extend our impact in Cleveland and strengthen network sustainability by adding 1-2 additional schools to the Partnership Cleveland network in 2021.

We need your help to grow!  

We hope to grow the present enrollment at each of our schools by 10% for the coming school year.  We have physical improvements in the wings, including all new student desks and more infrastructure work.  As mentioned above, we hope to add at least one more school to our growing network for next school year.  The cost for that will be dictated by which school (s) join and the condition it is in.  One thing for sure is that it will a considerable amount of money.  In the coming weeks we will launch our campaign to raise the money needed for our present schools for next year.  Stay tuned!!!  If you want to vist our schools or talk about how you could be a leader in our campaign please contact me at 216-409-7018.